Faculty Faces at the ISM Old Friends Return and New Friends Arrive

summer 2007 vol xv · no 10 music · worship · arts Prismyale institute of sacred music common ground for scholarship and practice Faculty Faces at the ISM Old Friends Return and New Friends Arrive Martin D. Jean As I write this, the ISM office is busy preparing for an exciting new academic year. In addition to welcoming our new students who will be profiled in the September issue of Prism, I am pleased to present some new faces on the faculty and welcome back some familiar ones. In the spring, we will be joined by Ivica Novakovic as visiting lecturer in religion and culture. Professor Novakovic is actively involved in helping us plan the 2008 ISM study tour to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia. He has studied physics, sociology, philosophy, and theology in Croatia, Switzerland, and the USA. His work is informed by these cultural contexts and he addresses transcultural and interdisciplinary questions, particularly those of theological rationality (Theology: Speculative or Combinatorial? 2004) and religious imagination (“Work on Symbols”). He has lectured in the areas of philosophical theology, systematic theology, contemporary theology, and the theology of culture (“Doing Theology in the Media Age”). More recently, he has focused his research on the problem of conceiving God’s presence and the modes of its representation and communication in music, images, and words. He is particularly interested in exploring how the sense of God’s presence can be presented in the contemporary world, where many religions and cultures meet in the context of conflict, and how it can provide a resource for reconciliation and broadening the vision of human flourishing. In the Spring, he will deliver two public lectures and as well as teach a course. (B.A., University of Zagreb; B.D., Baptist Theological Seminary in Zurich; Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary.) You have already heard the happy news that Peter Hawkins will return to Yale in fall of 2008. In the meantime, we are grateful that Traugott Lawler and Beverly Coyle return this year to lecture in religion and literature. Professor Coyle’s books on the poet Wallace Stevens preceded her turning to fiction writing and the publication of a collection of short stories and two novels: The Kneeling Bus (Ticknor and Fields, Penguin), Taken In (Viking, Penguin), and In Troubled Waters (Ticknor and Fields, Penguin). In Troubled Waters was a New York Times “Notable Book” in 1993 and named a “Ten Best Novels” selection by the American Library Association in 1994. Professor Coyle is professor emerita at Vassar College, where she was also the Mary Augusta Scott Professor of continued on page 2 Faculty Faces at the ISM continued from page 1 In Memoriam: Literature before her early retirement in 2000. Her Lana Schwebel first play, Parallel Lives, co-authored with journalist Bill Maxwell, is an autobiographical story about It is with great Lisak Robert A. growing up in the last days of Jim Crow segregation, sadness that we and premiered at American Stage Theater in 2003. announce the Her second play, A man and a woman and a blackbird, passing of our is in development. She makes her home in New York former colleague City and currently serves on the board of directors Lana Schwebel, for the organization Cross Currents, which publishes who died suddenly the critically acclaimed quarterly of the same on Saturday, July name. She will teach Playwrights and Dramatic 7 while traveling Interpretation/Performance. (B.A., Florida State abroad. Funeral University; Ph.D., University of Nebraska.) services were held Prof. Lawler is Professor on Wednesday, Emeritus of English at July 11 in Forest Yale; he taught a course on Hills, NY. Dante’s Divine Comedy From 2002 until 2006 she was assistant at the Institute in spring professor of religion and literature at the of 2007 and this year will Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity teach Four English Religious School. From 2006 until her death she was Poets. He has been writing assistant professor of English at Stern College in recent years mostly on of Yeshiva University. She is survived by her William Langland, and has parents, Philip and Lilly Schwebel, and her offered a graduate seminar on Langland six times sisters Elizabeth (Mrs. Shalom Wind) and since 1987. With four other scholars, he is working Pamela (Mrs. Gary Swickley). on a commentary on the poem in all its versions, Her lively intellect, quick wit, verve, and and is the author recently of “Langland’s Pardon- irrepressible spirit are gratefully remembered Formula: Its Ubiquity, Its Binary Shape, Its Silent by the faculty, students, and staff who were Middle Term,” in Yearbook of Language Studies fortunate enough to work and study with her 14, and “Langland and the Secular Clergy,” in YLS here. In Lana Schwebel we have lost a colleague, 16. He is also the author of The One and the Many mentor, and a charming and loving friend. in the Canterbury Tales (1980) and co-editor of The 2007-2008 Yale Literature and “Boece” for the Riverside Chaucer. He has regularly Spirituality Series is dedicated to her memory. offered informal tutorials in Latin for graduate Contributions in her memory may be made students preparing to meet the department’s Latin to Yeshiva University (www.yu.edu), Barnard requirement. In 1983 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. College (www.barnard.columbia.edu), Chabad of From 1986 to 1995 and again in 2002 to 2003, Irkutsk (www.fjc.ru/irkutsk), or to the charity of he served as Master of Ezra Stiles College. He your choice. retired in June, 2005 and is preparing, with other scholars, a commentary on the known versions of Piers Plowman, while continuing his research and remaining available to students. His other interests include Chaucer, Dante, medieval Latin, Old English, the history of the English language, and paleography. (B.A., College of the Holy Cross; M.A., University of Wisconsin; PH.D., Harvard University.) continued on page 6 Prism is published ten times a year by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music Martin D. Jean, director 409 Prospect Street New Haven, Connecticut 06511 telephone 203.432.5180 fax 203.432.5296 editor Melissa Maier [email protected] alumni and job placement editor Robert Bolyard [email protected] layout and design Elaine Piraino-Holevoet, PIROET A Little Help from Our Friends Fifth in a series of articles contributed by the Friends of the Institute, a group of talented professionals appointed by the director, who work in the various disciplines represented by the faculty and who serve to promote and advise on the programs, student recruitment, and activities of the Institute throughout the world. Visiting Opus 55 in its Birthplace Nicholas Wolterstorff Derek Greten-Harrison Derek If you follow the goings-on at ISM, you already know about Opus 55. Opus 55 is an organ. Specifically, it is the new organ commissioned by ISM being installed in the refurbished and expanded balcony of Marquand Chapel at Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. It was built by Taylor & Boody, an organ-making firm located outside Staunton, Virginia; and it gets its name from the fact that it is fifty-fifth in the series of organs built by Taylor & Boody. Last year I was a senior fellow at an institute attached to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Since Staunton is only about thirty miles from Charlottesville, I wanted to see the organ in its birthplace, before it was shipped up to New Haven. In early May George Taylor invited my wife, Claire, and a sister of mine who was visiting us, and me, to come out to see the organ. For all three of us it was an extraordinarily moving experience, as it was for my wife and sister. I’m sure I won’t fully succeed in explaining why; but perhaps I can give some intimation. There were two persons inside my skin that day. One of those persons is a member of the advisory board of friends of ISM and a recently retired member of the YDS faculty, where I regularly taught a course in Theological Aesthetics. I retain a great deal of affection for both of these institutions. The organ made me very proud of my and worse ways of attaching one piece of wood to connections with ISM and Yale. another, the difference between better and worse The other person inside my skin that day grew ways of finishing wood. He taught me what up in a farming village in southwest Minnesota, each kind of wood is capable of and what it is not where my father was a cabinetmaker and his father, capable of. my grandfather, a cabinetmaker before him. My Sometimes, when I have tried to communicate grandparents and their family emigated from to students what a good work of philosophy is like, the Netherlands in the second decade of the last I have said that good philosophy combines vision century; and some of the woodworking tools my and craftsmanship. Though few students would grandfather took with him from the Netherlands have known it, with the word “craftsmanship” I was have been passed down to me. His first and last alluding to my own experience of being reared in a name were the same as mine; burned into the wood cabinetmaker’s family. On a few occasions I have parts of these tools are the initials N.W. even spoken, metaphorically, of making tight-fitting My father taught me how to identify different dovetails. But I noticed that a mystified expression kinds of wood and how to prize the unique qualities came over the faces of the class; so in later years I of each.

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